TCM Genre movies schedule...

Actually it turns out there was a giant octopus in King Kong vs. Godzilla, by the name of Oodako. But apparently that simply means "King Octopus." And it's also called Daidako, which simply means "Giant Octopus." So maybe my complaint about Japanese kaiju names being more imaginative was misplaced...

I like that Hornet serial. I don't know if I would've appreciated it years ago but I like the way the Hornet and Kato look and the Black Beauty too. The music and sound, the cool logo, the screen wipes give a breezy vibe to it all. I like Ms. Case's voice, you never hear women with inflection like that nowadays, kinda big city kinda Mae West, hard to describe.

I think the thing that impressed me most was just the way the Hornet climbs a fire escape like a boss.

This week's Green Hornet chapters didn't handle the cliffhangers well at all. The resolution of last week's cliffhanger was what you'd expect -- they showed the part we didn't see before with the GH parachuting out of the crashing plane -- but in the subsequent two, the GH (with Kato in the second case) really was caught in the crash/explosion -- and just somehow happened to survive anyway, without explanation. That's weak.

But we did get confirmation that the car is called the Black Beauty here, although only in the opening text crawl. And we finally got to see an instance of the Hornet actually pretending to be a racketeer instead of just stumbling into the reputation, although only briefly.

I'm going to put the next bit in a spoiler box pro forma, even though I think it's obvious. It's about the identity of the mysterious "Chief" giving orders to the racketeers over the intercom:

There's no doubt in my mind that Monroe, the heavyset bad guy who keeps getting orders from the "Chief," is actually the Chief himself, and that "intercom" is just a tape recorder playing back prerecorded messages. That's the only way the "Chief" could always be there on cue just when Monroe wants him to be, and the only way he could know when to turn off the "intercom" without any cue that his "boss" was done speaking.

The cliffhangers are pretty half-hearted, but the serial is enjoyable overall. I like the characters and their interactions, especially Reid and Kato-- Kato is much more than a sidekick-- and I wish that Casey would get out of the office. The fight scenes are usually a step above what you usually see in a serial, especially the one in the office this week. I get a kick out of how the owner of the bus company has no idea why his buses are having so many problems when the bus driver and Reid can spot the clumsy sabotage in a matter of seconds.

^Yeah, and how we have one scene with Britt and the driver saying "That brake rod's been sawed through" and then a subsequent scene with Britt saying to the owner "You have no evidence of sabotage." Short memory, huh, Britt? (Well, I guess he could've meant "no evidence that Blue Streak is responsible for the sabotage," but that's flimsy.)